On Reverse Life Insurance and Regulating Controversial Markets Photo: Still Life With A Skull, Philippe de Champaigne (Wikimedia Commons) Imagine you are 25 years old and you have just been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Your physician says that you have 6-12 months to live. The shock begins to set in as you start to…

On Order Within the Universe and What It Means for Investors Photo: Pixabay In their natural environment, every mammal gets 1 to 1.5 billion heartbeats. This is true of the half ounce Estruscan shrew to the 180,000 pound Bowhead whale. Even humans, before the advent of sanitation and modern medical technology, got about 1 billion heartbeats…

How To Improve Your Writing With Simple Rhetorical Tricks Photo: Pixabay I didn’t used to be a good writer. Just read this post, this post or this one. Actually, don’t. But, you will notice that I got a lot better starting in late 2017. How did this transformation occur? Two things: I started using stories…

On the Democratization of Information Photo: Pixabay In 1815 a mountain called Tambora erupted on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia. Between 70,000-100,000 people were killed in the resulting blast that was estimated to be 150 times larger than the explosion at Mt. St. Helens. The eruption was so massive that it changed the global…

On Idealization and the Downsides of Getting What You Want Photo: Pixabay Imagine, just for a moment, that I make you the offer of a lifetime: I am going to give you $100 million, but…you have to accept this money publicly during a widely televised event (i.e. Super Bowl, NBA Finals, etc.) Would you take my offer?…

Financial Wisdom From Hetty Green Photo: Pixabay I know you’ve heard the names John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan, but what about Hetty Green? Hetty stood as the lone woman among the titans of the Gilded Age, and upon her death in 1916 she was worth $100 million. This sum was roughly equivalent to…

On Broad Trends and Prioritizing Process Over Outcomes Photo: Pixabay It was July 1, 1858 when the idea of evolution by natural selection was first presented to the scientific world. The work was a joint effort between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, both of whom had independently formulated their theories on evolution over prior…

Rethinking How To View Your Time Photo: Pixabay Peter Attia, a physician and longevity expert, has a talk on increasing your lifespan where he proposes an incredible thought experiment to his audience (see 16:49): I would be willing to bet that not one of you, if you were offered every dollar of Warren Buffett’s fortune, would…

How Event Order and Intensity Shapes Our Memories Photo: Pixabay He was preparing a fire inscription for an Israeli youth movement when he experienced the event that would change his life forever—the magnesium caught fire. Within seconds, a strong white light filled the room as flames, burning at a few thousand degrees Celsius, engulfed his…

Why We Shouldn’t Take Market History for Granted Photo: Pixabay When George Washington died in 1799, he didn’t know about dinosaurs. In fact, no one did. The first dinosaur bone was technically discovered in New Jersey in 1787, but its significance wasn’t recognized at the time and the bone was eventually lost. A few decades…